Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Stephen Hawking's Breakthrough StarShot

Stephen
Hawking on a New York stage during the announcement of the Breakthrough
Starshot initiative in April 2016. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)Humans are overdue for a return trip to the moon, Stephen Hawking has just opined.

Speaking on Tuesday at the Starmus Festival,
a science-slash-musical gathering, the astrophysicist offered two parts
doom cut with one part scientific optimism. He argued that we should
prepare for a cosmic exodus to take place in the next 200 to 500 years.

“We
are running out of space, and the only place we can go to are other
worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems,” he said via video
link to the audience gathered in Trondheim, Norway.

“Spreading out may
be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that
humans need to leave Earth.”

Hawking's plan to boogie off this
planet is ambitious: Countries should collaborate to construct a moon
colony within 30 years. We can reach Mars “in the next 15 years,” he
said, with a base to follow a few decades later.

The head of the European Space Agency said in 2016 that a “moon village” would take 20 years to plan and construct. NASA's long-term plans include sending humans to Marsby the 2030s.

Astronauts
last walked on the moon in 1972, the same year that Elton John's
“Rocket Man” debuted on vinyl. The final lunar visitor, Eugene Cernan,
died in January. Cernan remained a lifelong advocate for space travel,
testifying before Congress in 2011 that American space exploration was
on “a path of decay” after the Obama administration shuttered NASA's Constellation moon program.

Hawking's gloom goes beyond decay into eschatology. In November, he said we had about 1,000 years left before escaping to the stars. In May, he chopped that timetable to the next hundred years. During
his speech Tuesday, titled “The future of humanity,” the 75-year-old
black hole expert said that “Earth is under threat from so many areas
that it is difficult for me to be positive.”

There
are extraterrestrial apocalypses, such as asteroid impacts “guaranteed
by the laws of physics and probability.” On Earth, Hawking cited melting
polar ice caps, loss of animal life and dwindling physical resources,
among other ill portents.

“The
Earth is becoming too small for us,” he said. Global warming is a
threat, too, a view he knows is not shared by President Trump, “who may
just have taken the most serious and wrong decision on climate change
this world has seen. I am arguing for the future of humanity and a
long-term strategy to achieve this.”

So let us set our sights
on other worlds. At a neighborly 4.37 light-years away, the
planet Proxima B in the Alpha Centauri system is a promising target,
Hawking said — except that with current technology, interstellar travel
is “utterly impractical.”

He outlined some of the theoretical technology behindBreakthrough Starshot,
a mission he supports along with Russian tycoon Yuri Milner. The goal
is to send tiny probes all 25 trillion miles to Proxima B and have them
beam back information.

This animation provided by the Breakthrough
Initiative shows how the planned light-propelled nanocrafts would travel
to another star system.
(Breakthrough Initiative) 35 sec.In theory, an array of powerful lasers,
blasting up to 100 gigawatts of power combined into space, could propel
nanocraft like sailboats caught in a mighty wind. The probes would fly
by Mars in an hour, Pluto in days and Alpha Centauri in 20 years,
Hawking said. (He does not envision such a system being useful for human
interstellar travel, though, in part because light-propelled craft have
no brakes to pump.)

“The
human race has existed as a separate species for about 2 million years.
Civilization began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development
has been steadily increasing,” Hawking said. “If humanity is to continue
for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one
else has gone before.”

NASA solution for Stephen Hawking's Breakthrough StarShot

A
mission to Alpha Centauri backed by Stephen Hawking has been generating
a lot of buzz. Not all of the kinks are worked out, however. NASA and
Korea Institute of Science and Technology have a plan to keep the tiny
spacecraft alive as it sails through the stars.

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This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
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There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.